The Translator’s Invisibility

By adopting a strategy of resistancy to translate De Angelis’s poem, I have been unfaithful to, and have in fact challenged, the dominant aesthetic in the target-language culture, i.e., Anglo-American culture, becoming a nomad in my own language, a runaway from the mother tongue. At the same time, however, implementing this strategy must not be viewed as making the translation more faithful to the source-language text. Although resistancy can be said to rest on the same basic assumptions about language and subjectivity that inform De Angelis’s poetry, my English version still deviates from the Italian text in decisive ways that force a radical rethinking of fidelity in translation. The kind of fidelity that comes into play here has been called “abusive” by Philip Lewis: the translator whose “aim is to recreate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text” winds up both “forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which [the translation] is a dependent” and “directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates” (Lewis 1985:43). The “abuses” of De Angelis’s writing are precisely its points of discontinuity and indeterminacy. They continue to exert their force in Italian culture, on the Italian-language reader, long after the publication of Somiglianze. In 1983, for instance, the poet Maurizio Cucchi began his dictionary entry on De Angelis by stating that “pensiero e libertà dell’immagine spesso coesistono nei suoi versi, rivelando una sottesa, insinuante inquietudine, un attraversamento sempre arduo e perturbante dell’esperienza”/ “idea and freedom of image often coexist in his verses, revealing a subtending, insinuating uneasiness, an always arduous and troubling skewing of experience” (Cucchi 1983:116). My strategy of resistancy aims to reproduce this effect in English by resorting to analogous techniques of fragmentation and proliferation of meaning. As a consequence, the translation establishes an abusive fidelity to the Italian text: on the one hand, the translation resists the transparent aesthetic of Anglo-American culture which would try to domesticate De Angelis’s difficult writing by demanding a {292} fluent strategy; on the other hand, the translation simultaneously creates a resistance in relation to De Angelis’s text, qualifying its meaning with additions and subtractions which constitute a “critical thrust” toward it.

For example, certain features of the syntax in my translation make it stranger than De Angelis’s Italian. His first line gives a verb with no subject—“È venuta”—which is grammatically acceptable and intelligible in Italian because this particular tense indicates the gender of the subject, here feminine, almost immediately leading the Italianlanguage reader to the last feminine noun, which happens to be in the title, “L’idea.” English sentences without subjects are grammatically incorrect and often unintelligible. By following the Italian closely and omitting the subject, therefore, I was actually moving away from the foreign text, or at least making it more difficult, more peculiar: “È venuta” seems fluent to the Italian-language reader, the upper-case “e” showing that it begins a sentence, whereas the grammatical violation in “came to mind” (with the lower case) makes it seem unidiomatic or resistant to an English-language reader—even if this is only an initial effect, which eventually forces a glance back toward the title for meaning. My translation takes a syntactical subtlety in the Italian version, the absence of any explicit subject, and distorts it, giving exaggerated emphasis to what is only gently hinted in the Italian: that the central idea always remains outside of the poem because it is never explicitly stated, perhaps because it cannot be, because it questions any form of representation, whether in language, or X-rays.

In this instance, my translation exceeds the foreign text because of irreducible differences between the source and target languages, syntactical differences which complicate the effort to produce resistancy. But the excess in the translation can also be seen in the fact that I rendered certain lines primarily on the basis of an interpretation of the poem. Because interpretation and poem are distinct entities, determined by different factors, serving different functions, leading different discursive lives, my interpretive translation should be seen as a transformation of the poem, grounded, it is true, on information about De Angelis’s readings in literature, literary criticism, and philosophy, but aimed at circulating this body of writing in the English-language culture where it continues to be alien and marginal. For what De Angelis’s poem shows Anglo-American readers, with all the discomfort of the unintelligible, is that European culture has decisively moved beyond romanticism, in both its nineteenth- and twentieth-century manifestations.